literary criticism for the next few years. We want all the new ideas, and especially all the new achievements, that the New Age can give us; but one can hardly be regarded as a reactionary, even by the Spectator, if one asserts that our great new cities will not be built any the more quickly if we devote our energies to the destruction of Westminster Abbey. The predominance of the destructive mind in what I have called certain sections of metropolitan criticism is closely connected with that loss of the central position, that loss of a belief in the fundamental harmony of things of which I spoke earlier. It has become the fashion to estimate a man's power in art and literature by his ability to suggest the utter futility of human effort and the ultimate meaninglessness of the universe. There is, of course, a shallow optimism; but I do not know that it is any more common than a shallow pessimism. I do not know that it is any easier to be optimistic at the present day than to be pessimistic. Those who take the view that, ultimately, nothing matters, are of little value in any department of life, and certainly they cannot produce the greatest art. If the universe is meaningless, so must be the art produced by it. There is, of course, a profound pessimism; but its depths are not sounded by the discovery that there is a skeleton an inch beneath the skin of man. There is a profound pessimism in the Book of Ecclesiastes, but the greatest word of that Book is not in the proclamation that all is vanity, but in the moment where the writer is caught up into the universal harmony, and calls upon youth not to revolt but to remember, and does so in the

recurrent rhythms of poetry: " Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern."

We are sometimes told that those of us who profoundly disagree with the philosophy of futility must not venture to criticise or state our reasons for disagreeing with the eminent intellects who proclaim it; but, if the appeal to authority is to hold good in this curiously self-contradictory era of rebellion, I for one am quite ready to make my appeal to the highest name of all in literature. Those who affirm that, because beauty fades and youth perishes, we are all the puppets of a meaningless power, were answered in anticipation, three hundred years ago, by the greatest of all dramatic poets, speaking, not through one of his characters, but through his own lips and from his own ever-living soul, and affirming that above all our tempests there is an ever-fixèd mark, a star "whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved

I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

We talk of giving the new generation its opportunity, and our cynics are laying upon its shoulders the heaviest and dreariest burden the young have ever been called upon to bear. We are giving them only one-half of the message of their profoundest pessimist, the half that can choke their souls with

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dust. We are telling them that dust ends all; we call on great contemporary names in literature to emphasise it and to silence the reply of their own hearts, and they are not always able to summon up that vast cloud of witness which in all ages has pointed the human spirit to a realm beyond these voices. The editors of journals concerned with literature are making the most stupendous mistake if they think that the little metropolitan coteries who have been substituting cleverness for feeling, and sophisticated brutality for the simplicities of our fathers, in any way represent the great majority of the public, or even that part of it which reads literature. The claims of some of the new rebels to be representative of the modern spirit appear to be based on the extreme smallness of the sales of their books; but this does not prevent a disastrous confusion of values if editors. of journals do not realise this and are not alive to their responsibilities. One of the great difficulties is that the critics who ought to be safeguarding the best of our literature are the very men in whom familiarity with it has induced weariness and a desire for anything that will tickle or scorch their jaded palates. But this is not what their audiences may justly require of them. The new generation is being confused from above and misled even by "educational " introductions to literature. It is quite ridiculous to suggest that the young men of this generation are themselves in revolt against the masterpieces of literature of the nineteenth century. I have had the opportunity of addressing audiences of many thousands. of students in the colleges of the New World, and I have seen them again and again kindling to the work.

of poets like Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson, when they are given the faintest chance of appreciating it. Not one young man in ten thousand, among those capable of appreciating literature, will revolt against even the familiar poem, four lines of which may be taken almost as a description of Tennyson's own work :

"Such a tide as moving seems asleep

Too full for sound or foam

When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home."

But our metropolitan journals have been dinning into their ears that there is no knowledge or device in the past that can help them, and no real hope in the future to which they are going. I know of nothing sadder than the sight of the young trying to conceal the intellectual wounds that the elderly cynics have inflicted upon them; for the quiet sadness of many of the more thoughtful of the younger generation arises from that bitterest and most desolate feeling of the human heart-" They have taken away my Master, and I know not where they have laid him.'